Hugging Face's $399 Open-Source Duck Robot Can Roller-Skate

Pollen Robotics, the French robotics studio Hugging Face bought in April 2025, is now taking preorders for a waddling, roller-skating duck robot called Microduck. It costs $399 and ships before Christmas 2026.

Standing under 10 inches (25 centimeters) tall, Microduck is a small biped built for open-ended experimentation rather than a single fixed task. It can waddle, crouch, pick up objects weighing up to 800 grams with its beak, right itself after falling, and roll around on skates.

The hardware stack includes a camera, LiDAR, motion sensors, and articulated legs, neck, and head, all run through a Rockchip RK3566 processor, according to The Verge. Buyers can pick from four colors: cream, graphite, lavender, and sky blue.

What separates Microduck from a novelty toy is its openness. The SDK, a simulation environment, and a reinforcement-learning training stack are all published on GitHub, letting owners train new behaviors in simulation and push them directly onto the physical robot.

Each unit also generates its own audio identity the first time it powers on, a voice that stays with it for the rest of its operating life. It's a small touch, but one aimed at making a $399 robot feel like a persistent companion rather than an interchangeable gadget.

Microduck follows Reachy Mini, the desktop robot Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics released earlier, which came in a $499 full version and a $399 Lite model. The duck's price point lands at the cheaper end of that lineup while adding legs and locomotion that Reachy Mini's stationary desktop form never had.

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue has positioned these low-cost, hackable robots as a way to get physical AI experimentation into more hands, mirroring the open-model strategy that built the company's software business. Whether Microduck becomes a serious research platform or stays a well-engineered curiosity will likely hinge on how many developers actually retrain it once the preorders start arriving.